Re-evaluation of Chinese Socialist Realism’s Value Directions in Zhang Wei’s “Ancient Ship”

The article conducts a re-evaluation of values of Chinese socialist realism using Zhang Wei's novel “Ancient Ship” (1986) as an example. The novel’s key characters are analyzed in detail, while taking into consideration the values and semantic structures of earlier Chinese novels, the so-called “Red classics” of the 1950s. The narrative’s land reform taking place in rural China is used as a significant example of the re-evaluation of socialist realism’s values and their direction, in comparison with Ding Ling’s “The Sun Shines over the Sanggan River” (1948). Using specific examples, the article reveals that the main directions of the re-evaluation of socialist realism’s values are the author’s critique of the so-called “revolutionary history”, which is demonstrated as being inseparable from violence, chaos, and pursuing personal and clan interests. Zhang Wei achieves this through a series of narrative and descriptive creative strategies. The findings presented in the article are aimed at demonstrating that the “revolutionary history” is not only an important topic in contemporary Chinese literature, but also serves as a way for writers to deal with “revolutionary history” changes alongside new developments in Chinese literature.